Call for Proposals for an Edited Collection
CfP: Internet Mutations: Resistance and Control
Editors: Erika Pearson (University of Otago, NZ)
Tessa Houghton (University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus)
Contacts: erika.pearson@otago.ac.nz
tessa.houghton@nottingham.edu.my
Dates: Chapter proposals (title + 300-word (max) abstract + brief CV of the author/s) are sought by 02/12 for consideration by the publisher (Springer).
The internet is contested: issues as diverse as censorship, connectivity, digital divides, hacking and hacktivism, grass-root resistance in virtual worlds and even what apps you can buy from an online store all affect how people as individuals, as consumers, and as citizens engage both with and on the internet. Utopian and dystopian ideals have now given way to an experience of the internet which has scope for everything from grassroots communication and social mobilization through to totalitarian regimes attempts to shutdown citizen access to these tools. Acts of resistance and acts of control utilize the same tools and sometimes even the same modes of communication and interaction, and often it is only a matter of perspective as to what is ‘resistance’ and what is ‘control.’
This book brings together multiple perspectives on the internet as a contested and contestable space, and in doing so, we highlight the complex interplay of social, technical, economic and political factors that construct the digital landscape of the twenty-first century. This book will focus its attentions on struggle: the ways the internet is used as a site of debate and tension, resistance and control, and is thus itself contested. Furthermore, this book will situate itself within the Asia-Pacific context as exemplifying the global contestations, and raise and explore issues of resistance and control that particularly impact internet users and online producers from the region as they extend out into cyberspace, and extend the internet into their everyday lives.
This call is seeking potential chapter submissions from any disciplinary area related to the themes of this book. Possible chapter topics include (but are not limited to):
• Censorship
• Copyright and intellectual property
• Online activism & political dissent
• Access & equity
• Grass-root resistance in virtual worlds & gaming
• Privacy & security
• The role of the state/private interests
• Changing paradigms of education and training
• Issues of transnational information flows
• Mobile technologies and nomadic access
the magpie problem
I’ve often talked to my students and colleagues about the magpie problem, but I’ve never blogged about it. So what is the magpie problem?
Different academics have different names for it. The Thesis Whisperer spoke about The Dark Side, and I’ve also heard it called the Distraction Game, and Condensed Procrastination. I like to call it the Magpie Problem because it lets me do stupid bird impressions, but essentially, what we’re referring to here is the tendency to get distracted by interesting things that are not related to our current task or problem (like, say, finishing a PhD). Just the same way that magpies get distracted by something shiny (like tinfoil, or a bauble), we get distracted by a new book, or a new project, or a new idea. The grass is always more interesting over there.
That things are shiny isn’t the problem. What is the problem is the getting distracted. Everyone I know has some trick or tip for dealing with distraction. Mine is to have a magpie box (a folder on my computer; in my PhD days it was a literal box) where interesting things go, to be taken out at a later date when I am looking for a new task — many a new project or paper has come about when I get the chance to open my box and have a dig around for the shiniest shiny.
As I get older, the second part of the magpie problem is actually finding time to go into the magpie box. Just as we don’t want to be distracted too much by all the shinies out there, at the same time we don’t want to get too insular, too focused on only one thing so that we miss everything else. Google has the 20% time idea, where one day a week is given over to things ‘beyond the job description.’ I don’t think there are many academics who could give over a day a week to pecking at shiny ideas, but a little time here could be all that is needed to balance focus with “ooh, shiny!”
What about you? What do you do to manage distraction and interest and focus? ~points to the comments~
magpie image © Copyright Simon Johnston and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
Monday’s Snow Post
Stuck at home in lieu of skiing to work, but that’s okay because the Otago Graduate TweetCon is running right here on my desktop. Check in, or read back the tweets and watch grad students (including some of mine!) explain their research in six tweets and then answer questions.
Pretty awesome idea, full props to @OtagoGRS for organizing. Next, we totally need to get the STAFF to tweet their work in six tweets or less :)
retweet is not a tweet
Since I’ve been lax and lazy, an off-schedule post. I am always happy to take suggestions for academic blog post topics! (leave a comment!)
But anyway, in lieu of a real topic, have some vague ramblings. Two things have converged in my head recently. Firstly, I’ve been playing more in tumblr (gracious hosts of this blog) and I’ve been coming to grips with the ‘new and improved’ twitter.
One of the ‘features’ of new!Twitter is that links and photos are embedded in the stream. Here’s an example from my local newspaper as it appears on my feed:
Now, these types of tweets are incredibly easy to retweet - just hit the retweet button, and poof, the tweet appears, in whole and unedited, in my followers tweetstream.
The difficulty lies in adding a comment to it. Back in the bad old days of twitter, when we had to writer RT @ and then copy and paste the tweet in, you could edit the message or add a pre-RT comment. But with links and images appearing like that, you can no longer copy and paste. And as such, you can no longer add your own comment to the tweet.
My early days in power-using tumblr have a similar flavour. At least when you reblog a tumblr-post, you can add a comment at the bottom. However, beyond liking or going to a specific tumblr’s ask-box (if enabled), I’m finding that commenting on what is going on in my dash is, well, difficult. It may be that I haven’t got my dash set up right. But as it stands, I feel more like a spectator than a participant in what is going on on my tumblr-dash. (It also feels very echo-chamber-y when a post goes viral and everyone reblogs it).
It may be a case that a new way of using and engaging slowly emerges from the crowd, each of us learning from each other. After all, it’s been my experience of social media that it’s very hard to shut folk up! :) But I do chafe every time I retweet in particular, and can’t add a note explaining why I retweeted it. I don’t want to be an echo. I want to be a voice in the conversation.
Hurry up, crowd, I’ve got stuff to say.
imposters syndrome and evading the fraud police
Another monday, another post. This week, the topic comes once again courtesy of twitter: imposters syndrome.
My remarks are brief: everyone, at some stage, feels like a fraud. At any moment, someone around you is afraid the fraud police are going to leap out and go “AHA! GOTCHA!” and cart them off to Fraud Prison in full view of everyone, who will forevermore know that they didn’t know what they were doing.
If you are feeling like an Academic Imposter, I have one thing to say to you: GOOD.
Actually, I have two things: Welcome to the club. If you are muddling along in a new job, or a new project, or a new position, or fumbling to make sense of a grants application or a submissions process or a PhD thesis, and you are feeling like an imposter, like you don’t know what you are doing, trust me. this is a good thing. It means you are pushing boundaries, uncovering novel ideas, learning new things. It’s the day you realize that it’s been a while since you felt like you were winging it that you need to start worrying.
So keep on winging it. Fake it ‘til you make it. Try on new faces, impose.
It’s the only way you’re going to get anything done.
things i learned in my phd, by erika, ages 3 1/2
Last night on twitter, the usual suspects of @thesiswhisperer, @witty_knitter , @bradyjay and I started talking about possible blog topics. And we soon homed in on the idea of all of us blogging on a single topic and interlinking our different perspectives. Some more people joined the twitter discussion (~waves~) and soon (after some bad puns and an X-Men reference) we came up with our first blog topic: things I learned doing my PhD.
The lovely @thesiswhisperer, Inger , suggested one thing. I am a verbose overachiever (see also: indecisive), so here are my top three.
1. I learned to manage my time and resources better. This is an ongoing project, but one that definitely improved over the course of my PhD, and especially in the last year (in between bouts of me wailing and going ‘why didn’t I do this earlier?’). To contextualize, I was working on average three paid jobs at any one time (teaching, adjunct work, RA work, at the International College, and of course the old fallback of retail /o\), dealing with the usual personal pressures (I busted my hip about halfway through and spent nearly a year walking only with difficulty), and studying in various patterns of full and part-time.
Before that, I had studied full-time with the financial support of my parents. Being responsible for all these other elements made me rethink a lot of my patterns. For instance, I had one of the first-generation palmtop computers (an ASUS with a version of Word loaded onto it!) and given I couldn’t drive with my hip, I started using my bus/train trips as ways to catch up on my reading and editing. I started allocating ten minutes at the end of each day to file away papers and articles. I got religious about keeping my diary with all my appointments, shifts and obligations, and started putting in not only deadlines, but also notes days or weeks ahead of that to remind me things were coming up. I embraced my filing cabinet at my office as something more than a place to stash snacks.
Finally, I started using my own skills better. I am a visual-kinesthetic person, so instead of doing what I was ‘told’ to in terms of organization (i.e.: lists or writing-orientated management) I figured out systems that worked for me: books were organized on my shelf so their spatial relations told me what was in them at a glance. I acquired the old fax rolls (showing my age here!) and rolled them down the passage of our sharehouse to physically map out with coloured markers what would go into my chapters and how to slot my ideas into the linear structures required for a PhD. (Yes, I had the world’s most understanding housemates!). I started to use what was once seen as a ‘weakness’ in my thinking and found ways to turn it into a strength – and it’s a strength that led pretty much directly to my current job, but that’s another blog post!
2. I learned that a good project is a finished project. I took an embarrassingly long time to finish. I could talk about my supervision problems, my lack of preparedness (I went straight from honours to PhD, which is kind of like going from making plane noises while running around with your arms out to piloting a 747), a whole bunch of stuff. But in the end, I went into the PhD without a clear goal and pathway as to where I wanted to end up. I had vague, romantic ideas about academia (now well and truly popped), and as a result, I fuffed about for a very long time.
This isn’t all bad: I read widely, developed a wide knowledge base which has stood me in good stead, did conferences and got teaching experience. But it did mean I took a long, long time to complete. Looking back, I definitely had completion anxiety: will this be good enough? Everyone kept telling me something I didn’t grasp until I graduated — the only good thesis is a completed thesis. The PhD is not the magnum opus, your great life’s work. It is a driver’s license, a test in a safe little bubble to see if you can go away, ask a question, and answer it. That’s it.
3. I learned that you need to have balance and boundaries. This one has really been driven home to me as I’ve met other academics who came up in ‘pressure cooker’ postgrad programs. It’s simply: work to live, don’t live to work. Even as a postgrad, I noticed some people were in the lab at all hours, sending emails at 3am, bragging about how little sleep they were getting and how much time they were spending on their work. And it struck me, then and now, that it was a type of performance, a self-prescribed role as if to say to the world ‘I have worth.’
I learned, and am continuing to learn, that quantity does not equal quality (and sometimes time spent doesn’t even automatically equal quantity!). I learned to make clear decisions about ‘work time’ and ‘not!work time.’ If a PhD is a license to research * then it makes sense to use that time to figure out how you work best, not how to work constantly. I learned that I do my best writing between 8am and noon. After lunch, I that I am good only for filing and talking my head off. And I never work past 6pm. Or weekends. I don’t take a sense of my own ‘worth’ purely from how many hours I spend in the office.
Because when I was a postgrad, weekends and evenings were spent in retail hell, getting paid. And now I’ve got my license and am getting paid to research, weekends and evenings are my time. And what a lovely reward they are!
I learned a lot more than this, of course (like how to cite properly, and which seminars had the best free food! ) but those are the ones that carried over most into my post-PhD life. I’d love to hear from others as to what they learned, or are learning as they do their PhD!
* feel free to take a moment to do your best James Bond impression. Done? Okay, back up to the text
just pretend it’s still the beginning of the year
I really want to use this blog more often, however, I often feel that the things I might post about wouldn’t be of interest to anyone else. So, I’m crowdsourcing: is there anything I might write about that you might be interested in reading?
My research musings? Bullshit stories about life in the ivory tower. Aunty E’s helpful tips for the masses? Random links? Nothing at all?
Lines are open, and trained monkeys are standing by to take your call.
the academic job hunt
(below is a rough recap of some of the things discussed at the ‘so you want to be an academic’ pre-conference workshop at IRGO2. If I’ve missed/forgotten anything, hit me up in the comments - e.)
Searching for a job does not have to feel like you’re facing a firing squad. I’m going to talk about my experiences on both sides of the desk, but it must be noted, I’ve never gone tenure-track in the US context, which has it’s own unique hurdles to jump. For that, I suggest reading “a critical communication studies job search timeline’ by Jonathan Stearne.
job hunting: getting started
Firstly, you need to think about what kind of position you are after: academic or non-academic? Research, teaching, or a mix. PhDs are becoming more valued outside academia in non-science fields, but you might still have to work to sell yourself as ‘ideal’ and not ‘overqualified.’ This post deals predominantly with seeking an academic position outside the US tenure system.
Secondly, you need to ask yourself (and your supervisor!) ‘am I ready?’ Take a good hard look at your own prepared-ness. Going too early is just a waste of time, particularly with the glut of freshly minted PhDs out there. As a general rule of thumb, start applying for academic positions about twelve months out from your submission date (add it into your research and work timeline). The hiring process can be quite long, so you want to rack up your applications well in advance to optimize your chances of walking out of your studies and straight into a job.
Thirdly, assess what you want, not only in terms of a job, but also in terms of your overall work-life balance. Think about places you would like to live/not like to live, whether you’re happy to work an 80-hour week or not. Your first job is your first step in what is hopefully a long career, so from the outset try to guide your career towards where you want it to go. You may not always get what you want, but in the immortal words of the Stones, if you try, you can get what you need.
Fourthly, work smarter. There are a lot of useful tools and services that will help you get maximum job search coverage for minimum effort. More on those in a minute.
Finally, be prepared for rejection that may have nothing to do with your merits as a young scholar. Don’t over-invest in any advertised job (at least not until you’ve formally accepted an offer!).
be wery wery qwiet - we’re hunting jobs!
My first piece of advice here is be open to opportunity - you may have a dream of working at Particular University, but you might need to accept a position at Secondchoice U. and work towards your goal long term. This is not to say accept ANY job — we all have our limits of things we won’t do (for me it was working in the US tenure system, for a colleague it was working anywhere that didn’t have access to a surf beach!) but be reasonable about where you are on the pecking order (hint: the bottom). The first job is the hardest to get. Once you have been in a position for a few years (unless you completely balls it up, and we know you won’t do that), you will start to build your own reputation and can then move onto the next stage of your career. The hard part is getting into the academic system so you can start that profile-building.
Having thought about what you want, what you would like (but don’t necessarily need), and what your deal-breakers are, you can then start job hunting. I’ve previously posted a list of some websites to get you started — this list has a slight bias towards Commonwealth jobs in the broad field of media and communications, and is by no means complete, but you can see there are a LOT of sites where jobs are advertised, not even counting individual institutional HR pages. Learn to use email alerts and RSS to bring alerts to you. Pay attention to key words and set aside some time to search around the sites and get familiar with how they classify things: sometimes, fields are listed under strange sub-categories, and multidisciplinary scholars may have to track two or more categories. Also, make sure you are on discipline-specific association lists — set up a digest mode if they’re high-traffic lists, but make sure you at least skim them, especially during hiring periods.
On a similar note, you are probably going to discipline conferences — treat the entire conference as one big job interview. Dress appropriately, pay attention, don’t be afraid to introduce yourself around (and see if you can get invited to lunch with people higher up in your field - lunch is where everything happens at conferences!) Be memorable for being a professional young scholar with an exciting research agenda, not the slob who forgot their presentation notes!
Finally, before you start applying, google yourself (yes, go ego-surf). What are the top hits? How do they make you look to other people?
So, you’ve set out your parameters and some job ads have come to your attention. Be organized with them (pay attention to due dates!), and take a closer look at what you’ve got. Here is the first round of selectivity: go for jobs only where you either meet or are very close to meeting the requirements. For example, don’t apply for Chairs, full Professorships, or Heads of Department positions when you’re still to complete your dissertation. However, if a position says ‘PhD required’ and you expect to have yours either finishing examination or in revision by the time the panel meets, and you kill at all the other requirements, then maybe it might be worth a shot.
To find out, you need to read the job description. Closely. Several times. Don’t stick just with the short blurb in the newspaper or careers website, but go to the University HR site and read the full job description. While you’re there, check out the HR policy on hiring, and on the search process. See if they have an institutional CV template. If they do, use it — it’s what your search committee will be familiar with, and they’ll be able to grasp more easily what you have done.
But back to the job description itself. Go over it, identify key phrases, and think about how they apply to you. Try and get a sense of what kind of person they are looking for — are they seeking to invest in new scholarship, plug a hole in their research profile, or for someone to teach over a gap in their syllabus. Once you have a sense of that, you can focus your application accordingly. Send in only what they ask for, and make sure it’s in before the due date.
so what exactly is an application pack?
Every job will have a different application pack (yes, you will be shaking your fist to the sky over this sooner rather than later). So follow what they say to do. That being said, here are some general helpful tips.
Firstly, don’t have a pro-forma CV where you fill in the name of the university before sending it off. It is better to rewrite for every application, so you can direct the committee to your strengths as you see them in relation to THIS position. This is where what I call a ‘modular’ CV file helps - instead of one document, have a file of pages, with each page listing your strengths and achievements in one areas. You can then drop them into a new application in best order, without having to completely rewrite. Use citation software (EndNote, Zotero) for your own citations, so you can cite in the house style (APA, Harvard, MLA - see what style the academics in the department use on their own pages and follow their lead). And if you’ve found an institutional CV template, use that.
Besides the CV, you generally have at least a cover letter, and often these days either/or a writing sample, a sample of a syllabus or a teaching philosophy statement, and a list of referees. Some ask for all, some ask for bits to be submitted at different stages. Again, send what they ask, when they ask. Sending unsolicited extra material is just more work for the panel and it will probably get binned.
Most applications will have a cover letter. Give yourself time to work up a good cover letter, and don’t be afraid to google up examples to help you. Make sure you get the titles right, and spell names correctly. You have five (harried!) minutes to get a the attention of a busy stranger. The letter is a good place to sell yourself and get your application put on the pile marked ‘review’ rather than ‘reject.’
Be confident in your letter, but don’t oversell - most panels have finely tuned bullshit detectors. Also, (and this is where your research comes in), know and work to the cultural expectations and institutional language of the place you are applying to. Remember, you might be going to work there, so show a willingness to adapt to their culture. Use the terms they use (paper, course, module or term?) and understand what titles mean (an assistant professor in the North American system is not the same as an associate professor in the Commonwealth system). Work to your strengths, but the letter is also a good place to sell yourself as the complete package: teaching, research and service. Try not to just rehash your CV, but instead use your cover letter to contextualize and explain important points, and how they relate to the position advertised.
There is some debate on what to send as a writing sample, but generally speaking offer the best sample that reflects the needs of the position, and is within the limits (words or type) stipulated by the search committee. Don’t be afraid to respectfully contact the search chair if you need clarification on what they are looking for.
Teaching materials are sometimes also asked for in the original pack, though generally it seems they are asked for only from the shortlist candidates, at least at research intensive institutions. However, it may be useful to keep some on hand, particularly for first level and graduate level courses (which my informal polling suggests are the two most requested types).
Finally, think carefully about your referees; try to rank them by closest by discipline and highest by rank, but make sure you can trust them to give glowing references. A weak letter of support can be damning. Also, give your referees heads up of the jobs you are applying for. There is nothing worse for a candidate when a committee contacts a referee and they go “who?”
Finally, keep copies of your applications, and keep them organized. After a while, you start to develop a sense of what you’re doing right and wrong (and who knows, you might need to refer back to it when you get The Call).
omg i got the interview!
First, take a deep breath (okay, flail, then take a deep breath). You made a short list and have been called in for an interview. There are two things to think about, the logistics and the interview itself. Logistics, like ‘will they fly you over, or will it be a teleconference’ will need to be dealt with on a one-on-one basis. My North American colleagues say it is frequently becoming the case that institutions will ask you to pay your own travel, then reimburse you later (so, if that’s where you see your career heading, you might like to start saving in a slush fund now). My experiences in the Commonwealth system have generally been that the host institution both pays for and organizes interview travel. YMMV, but be clear who’s obligated for what.
Let’s talk about the interview itself. You may like to start humming the Mission: Impossible themesong right about now, because going to an interview is a little bit like planning a tactical assault. Some things to consider:
- research! know the place back the front
- who are the rock-star scholars? what is the overall direction of the dept research agenda?
- what kinds of papers do they teach? (do they even call them papers?)
- how might you fit in to all this? where are the areas of synergy, and where can you offer something new and fresh in both their teaching and research profile?
- (HR again) – have a sense of pay and conditions (incl. relocation!)
- Google “academic job interview questions” and have practiced answers (us using the same questions over and over isn’t lazy, it’s consistent!)
- Have a few questions of your own for the panel (generally, you’ll have a chance to ask them at some point in both the formal and informal proceedings)
- Don’t bullshit a panel. We’re experts :D
- Your ‘interview’ is actually your entire visit. (fit is as important as research) Just as when you go to conferences, behave yourself accordingly.
Afterwards, make sure to touch base with the panel chair and thank them for their consideration - you might get a chance to do this at the close of interview, or it might just be a quick email flicked off the day after. But it’s always worthwhile to leave a good final impression, even if you don’t get the job. It leaves the door open for you to apply again for the next job that comes up.
Sometimes, you might know that day, or it might take a few weeks for you to learn how you fared. There are things going on that you are not privy to (such as checking logistics with HR, or polling all staff after your visit to see how they found you), so be patient. If you haven’t heard back after a few weeks, a polite email to the Chair would be appropriate. But that being said, be prepared for rejection that has nothing to do with your merits. You’d be surprised how often I’ve heard people involved in jobsearches bemoaning that they can’t hire ALL the shortlist. Sometimes you get the bear, but sometimes, the bear gets you. Shake it off and move on.
If you don’t get a job, don’t badmouth ANYONE - not over coffee, not to a friend, and especially not on Facebook or Twitter. Academia is a small place, and throwing the equivalent of a toddler temper tantrum is a smell that lingers.
If you DO get a job offer, CONGRATULATIONS. This is why you researched their HR site. Negotiate what you are worth (because you are worth it), and don’t forget details like a relocation allowance or help for your partner to move with you. If you are moving to a new country, see if they have settlement support services. Universities are often quite supportive of helping their staff make the best start in their new position, so don’t be afraid to take advantage of what they offer to jumpstart your awesome career!
#IRGO2 - the final countdown
IRGO unConference 2.0 is almost upon us - are you coming?
The hashtag on twitter is #irgo2 if you want to follow along, and I may be live-blogging a few of the sessions.
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